


lived enough already

by watfordbird33



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, First War with Voldemort, M/M, Marauders, Marauders' Era, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-05 01:17:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12180060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watfordbird33/pseuds/watfordbird33
Summary: It had never been about Lily.





	lived enough already

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for non-explicit sex, suicidal thoughts, some very light referenced homophobia, minor descriptions of violence, alcohol, and an absurd amount of angst.

Years later, in the slow returning of another time, Sirius sat by the windowsill and put his hands where James had, and thought about his death. He traced the contours of it in the window-pane until it became a very real possibility: there, alone, forehead and glass and the absence of James's smile.

The truth was--and this was something that Sirius had an immense amount of trouble admitting to himself--that it had never been about Lily, or her love. This was a truth that James would have found repulsive and insane. James tended to plot out entire lifetimes based on Lily and her hair, events pinpointed by the way she moved, the jibes she spat, the love she gave. Sirius had told him, once, in a particularly nasty fit of jealousy, that the Lily System of measurement was not yet appoved in Great Britain. 

In the future, Remus asked Sirius if he thought James had ever loved him that way. All-encompassing and blind. 

 

First year, James told Lily he thought her hair was pretty, and when she thanked him, he pulled it and ran away. Severus caught up to James, later, and beat him up, and Sirius hexed Severus, and Lily punched Sirius in return. It was all like that in first year: good and evil, teams of two. And James had Sirius’s back.

 

The night before James and Lily died, Sirius read aloud to Harry, and kept him past his bedtime, and kissed him on the forehead before he went to sleep. Lily thanked him with her spitfire smile--still that bright red nymph of a Gryffindor girl. She went to bed early. Kissed James before she climbed the stairs, and it was a kiss like she meant it, an infinite  _ I love you  _ kind of kiss. Sirius didn’t hate her for it. He’d grown used to it, over time.

When she had gone, though, he was still the one who started it, who put his hand on James's bicep and his other hand on James's chest and leaned close across the loaded sofa and kissed him on the lips. He was the one who slipped off James's shirt and then his own, both of them naked to the waist, clinging to each other. They thought the spy was Remus, and they cried.

It was a long time before the shaking stilled, and then they held each other in silence until the last of the fire burned down.

 

Before that: a confrontation. Remus stood like a paper man in the doorway, in his cardigan. He had grown so very thin.

Sirius told him he couldn’t trust him anymore, that this was truth, that he’d have to understand. He told him one of them was doing it; leaking, breaking, stretched at odds with the rest of them, denying what they’d been before.

And.

“You fucker,” Remus said, so quietly, so  _ sharp.  _

Sirius wanted to put his arms up and cover his face, save his dignity, get away. He wanted to fall asleep in James's arms; the ones that held Harry, night after night after day. 

“You absolute  _ disaster,”  _ Remus breathed; “you--” 

The words splattered themselves evenly all across Sirius’s chest and when he looked down, they were red. He tracked them to the shattered part within his heart. He bled a lot, back then, and cried himself out, too. He spit blasphemy upon all the good things in his fucked-up life. 

 

He was seventeen and kissing James behind the dormitory door, sucking his cock in the broom closet between Potions and Defense, watching Lily with him, smiling, across the hall. He was fourteen and crying on James's shoulder in the dark.

“Do you love him?” Remus said, when he caught them seventh year, bare-chested and kissing frantically, desperately, as if they had no time. 

When Sirius didn’t answer, Remus put his hand to his forehead and took a long, long breath. He rephrased the question. “Do you really think he loves you? Do you really think it will last?”

Remus was very good at twisting knife-holes in Sirius’s heart. By the time Sirius turned twenty-one, he had so many holes in his heart that it was insubstantial as a cloud.

 

In his dreams, Sirius killed Peter. Ripped him apart, head to toe, and scattered his remains. He always laughed while he was doing it: this high, bitter, hysterical laughter. An unwinding, a love letter to James.

He dreamed it so many times that when Peter blew himself to pieces in the middle of a Muggle street, Sirius half-believed he’d done it. He believed the surge of power had come from his own wand; he believed his laughter had been grounded in insanity, not shock. He wanted such insanity. He craved it. It would be a good excuse.

 

“Does James still like me?” Lily asked him, sixth year. She was growing into her curves. She was red-haired and beautiful, and James loved her, the essence of her, the wildflower fire of her. Sirius knew this, even though he also knew the taste of James’s lips on his.

“I don’t think so,” he told her, apologetically. 

There was just a little guilt. He knew, even then, that he couldn’t put it off forever. Evans and Potter, written in the stars. It was an enemies-to-lovers, a perfect romance, an embrace. There was no room in their epic for a subplot with the best friend.

 

Sirius was the third person to hold Harry, after he was born. He tried to hate him, but he couldn’t. Instead he dropped the tiniest of kisses on his scrunched-up baby nose.

James told him he’d be a good father, and Sirius laughed. Later, when Lily had gone to bed, they kissed sort of lingeringly in the hospital lobby, behind a potted plant, and Sirius put his head on James’s shoulder and let him hold him, very close. He told James that he wished things had worked out differently, and James said he didn’t think things were over quite yet.

(It was a promise Sirius would write on shower walls, on fogged-up mirrors, on sidewalks in Harry’s burnt-out yellow chalk. Later, he would write it in the gap-holes in Remus’s cardigan. He would trace the pattern of it, dark and slim, on Remus’s thin chest.)

Peter came to see Harry, the day after. He held him awkwardly, and cooed at him, and passed him off to Sirius as soon as possible. Remus came the day after. He refused to hand the baby off. He held him while he talked; swayed him to sleep; moved from foot to foot like a man long accustomed to fatherhood. Lily teased him, and James laughed. 

 

Lily.

It had never been about Lily.

Sirius confronted this seven times, eight, nine and ten. He spoke it to Remus and had it shouted down. He sat on his stoop in the dark and thought about all his lies.

It had never been about Lily because it hadn’t started with her. It had started with two black-haired boys on a train, two razor souls, two pranksters, two smiles, two lost-in-translation teenage headcases, black as soot. Tangled up in sheets that smelled of sex. Kissing in bathrooms and closets just to get away. Every night, every day, Sirius falling. Lily just a side effect.

It had never been about Lily because Sirius didn’t hate her. Most days, he just hated himself.

 

“Why do you care so much?”

Things Sirius said to Remus when he believed him to be the spy.

“You’re just going to get hurt,” Remus said; “he’s just going to marry Lily, break your heart--”

“My heart’s been through a lot.”

Remus raised his hand, and Sirius took it without thinking about it, pressed it to his breast, let Remus feel the thump-thump beneath his breastbone, very strong.

“Feel that?” Sirius said.

Remus’s eyes were wide.

“I’d rather live while I can,” Sirius told him. “I’d rather kiss him in the dark like fucking teenagers, because I don’t think any of us have that much more life to live. We’ve lived enough already. We’ve used up all our years.”

“Voldemort,” Remus said; he always said it like that. Flat and stark and bare-bones, like a fact. Sirius supposed it was.

“One of us is going to kill the rest,” Sirius said. He realized Remus’s hand was still on his chest, and let it drop. “You know that.”

What he didn’t say was,  _ It’s you.  _ Or,  _ James chose  _ me  _ to be their Secret-Keeper, when it comes to that. _

Because he loves me, he didn’t say.

No one had ever loved Remus. This was a reality long acknowledged between them, between all of them. Even Peter had saved the worship for his hero, James.

“Yeah,” said Remus, very quietly. He put his hand up again and used it to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. He was already going a little gray, and Sirius found it strangely sickening. This reminder of mortality, this old man, this young one. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

 

He was thirteen, and he and James were on his mattress, side-by-side. They read a book about two boys who acted like a boy and girl in the patterns of their love. Sirius’s face was hot and red. He couldn’t look at James. 

He was fourteen, and Severus Snape called him a name he’d only heard his mother use before. He shook and shook; he couldn’t stop shaking. James put his arms tight around him and held him to his chest. He told him it would be all right. He told him he had him, he’d got him, he was going to be okay.

Fifteen, and he and James slept in the same bed. Sirius woke up with a hard-on, and took care of it in the dark.

 

Lily asked him to babysit Harry, and Sirius did. He held the baby in one arm for half the night. He crooned a song to him. He told him to love girls: that it was easier, that he wouldn’t be so hurt.

Harry grabbed his nose and twisted it and searched up Sirius’s sleeves for baubles and for toys. Sirius told him his dad was a masterpiece and his mom a miracle, and Harry said  _ bah  _ and started to cry.

After Sirius had fed him, they sat for a long time together on the sofa where Sirius had kissed James countless times. Harry babbled softly in Sirius’s arms, and Sirius put on an Aretha Franklin track which sang them both to sleep.

 

“Peter killed them,” Sirius said.

“He was their Secret-Keeper,” Sirius said.

“They thought no one would suspect him,” Sirius said.

 

“And you told them to change?” Remus said. He was a little drunk, and wearing his favorite cardigan, and his eyes were soft, soft. Sirius had shown up on his doorstep in the middle of the night. Thirteen years. Longer since the trust between them had been strong.

“Yeah,” said Sirius, “I told them to change. I told them it would be better. I told them I didn’t trust myself.”

“You killed him,” Remus said.

“I know.”

 

Once, in sixth year, Sirius had kissed Remus, too. It had been an accident; a misunderstanding; both of them slack with firewhiskey in the common room. Party games for New Year’s. No one had given a shit.

 

Harry got on his toy broomstick and crashed straight into Sirius’s legs. Sirius fell to his knees, expecting carnage and blood and tears, but Harry just laughed. He was two years old and delighted with the world, and his hair looked just like James’s.

His laughter made Sirius hysterical, and for a long moment they just lay there, godfather and little boy, crying with laughter on the ground. The broomstick had already whizzed away, probably to smash more vases in the other room, and James’s feet were coming down the stairs.  

But Harry said  _ more?  _ and Sirius said  _ yes _ , and he lifted his godson to his feet.

 

Twenty, and girls asked him if James Potter was fully Lily Evans’s; if maybe he’d be open for a bit of fun some night; they’d heard he was a real sweetheart, now, and awfully good in bed.

Sirius put on his best grin and warned them off. Here was what it kept coming back to: it had never been about Lily. Because it wasn’t Lily who Sirius was trying to save. 

He took his heart out, later, and analyzed it in the bathroom mirror of his London flat. It was a little misshapen, by now, after being trod on so many times. There was the big hole in the middle carved out by Remus (widened over the years) and all the little ones that James had poked, unseeing, not quite gleeful but delighted with his ingenuity. Look, Sirius, another hole. Another. Look at how pretty it is.

_ It  _ was the blood that Sirius had spilled, that had seeped into the fabric of his buttondowns and robes, that had made colorful flower patterns on James’s skin when they held each other chest-to-chest. A little of the blood had gotten on Remus’s cardigans, too, and on Harry’s off-white socks, and on the plump-cheeked visage of Peter Pettigrew, scarlet-hot. Sirius wondered why no one had ever asked about it. Sometimes, it seemed to be the only thing he saw.

 

“I understand if you never want to see me again,” Sirius said.

“You killed them,” Remus said. He looked at the glass of firewhiskey he held, the coaster on the table. His hand was shaking. He lifted the glass and flung it at the wall. “You killed your best friend. You killed the man you loved.”

“I want to die, too,” Sirius said, “sometimes.” But what he meant was all the time. 

“That wouldn’t help anything,” Remus said. “You’ve dug yourself a hole, and that would only dig it deeper.”

“Eventually I’ll come out the other side.”

“I’m not on the other side,” said Remus, and he looked Sirius in the eye.

Sirius had trouble breathing for a second. He turned his gaze away and stared into the middle of his firewhiskey. It smelled like the singe on clothes after the Killing Curse. A wave of nausea swept him, and he got up, shaking.

“Sirius,” Remus said; “Pads.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“You can’t stay where you are.”

“I’m happy where I am.”

He didn’t know what happy felt like, anymore. Azkaban had taken that from him, along with memories, and the sensation of being human. He could feel his hair in rough dreadlocks down his back.

“I know you loved him,” Remus said.

“He didn’t love me.”

Remus was silent.

“It was never about Lily, though,” Sirius said.

“I know.”

“It was just about it not being me.”

Remus stood up so he was facing Sirius. This close, he could smell the firewhiskey tang on Remus’s breath. He could trace the gaps in his yellow cardigan, if he wanted to. Perhaps there was still a little of James caught up in Remus’s smile.

“Pads,” Remus said.

“Don’t--”

“I’ll call you whatever I damn well please.”

They kissed, and it was hungry. Sirius dropped his firewhiskey and slid his hand down Remus’s shoulder blades to his waist. He put his other hand on the side of Remus’s jaw, cupping it. His nails were too long, and they dug in.

The couch was wet with whiskey, but they fell onto it anyway; oriented themselves horizontal, arranged their legs and arms. They didn’t speak, or breathe.

 

He was eleven, and James said he’d be in Gryffindor. There was a little pale scarred boy, in the corridor, watching them, but neither of them saw. 

Later, the little scarred boy turned into a wolf. It sounded like a fairy tale.


End file.
